Slitless spectrophotometry with forward modelling: Principles and application to measuring atmospheric transmission

Abstract

Context. In the next decade, many optical surveys will aim to answer the question of the nature of dark energy by measuring its equation-of-state parameter at the per mill level. This requires trusting the photometric calibration of the survey with a precision never reached so far on many sources of systematic uncertainties. The measurement of the on-site atmospheric transmission for each exposure, or for each season or for the full survey on average, can help reach the per mill precision for the magnitudes. Aims. This work aims at proving the ability to use slitless spectroscopy for standard-star spectrophotometry and its use to monitor on-site atmospheric transmission as needed, for example, by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time supernova cosmology program. We fully deal with the case of a disperser in the filter wheel, which is the configuration chosen in the Rubin Auxiliary Telescope. Methods. The theoretical basis of slitless spectrophotometry is at the heart of our forward-model approach to extract spectroscopic information from slitless data. We developed a publicly available software called Spectractor, which implements each ingredient of the model and finally performs a fit of a spectrogram model directly on image data to obtain the spectrum. Results. We show through simulations that our model allows us to understand the structure of spectrophotometric exposures. We also demonstrate its use on real data by solving specific issues and illustrating that our procedure allows the improvement of the model describing the data. Finally, we discuss how this approach can be used to directly extract atmospheric transmission parameters from the data and thus provide the base for on-site atmosphere monitoring. We show the efficiency of the procedure in simulations and test it on the limited available data set.